


Fever Dreams

by vials



Category: A Perfect Spy - John le Carré
Genre: Gen, Sick Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 17:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11235312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Axel is sick and in a confessional mood, and Pym is his ever present confessor.





	Fever Dreams

Axel’s fever had reached dangerously a high level. 

Pym tried to remember how high a person’s body temperature could go before it killed them, but try as he might he couldn’t pinpoint it. He thought that whatever it was, it was probably not far off Axel’s body temperature right now, as he squirmed around on the bedclothes, trying to pull them back over himself. Pym was of mixed opinions on what to do. Some people said it was best to let him sweat it out, that the extra heat from the blanket would be good for him in the long run. Others said that it was important to cool him down at this point, before his brain baked in his skull. The doctor had said that for all he knew that was probably happening already: Pym hadn’t been encouraged when the doctor had taken one look at Axel and exclaimed _Christ, he’s still alive_? 

Even so, Pym had decided it was probably better to follow the professional’s advice, even if he hadn’t seemed all that confident that Axel would recover. Pym couldn’t really blame him. Axel didn’t look like the kind of person a doctor would put much faith in, considering how skinny he was. He looked like he shouldn’t be alive at the best of times, so times like these must double the impact. The doctor had said that it would be best to try and keep him cool, and then if the fever went down sweating it out might be an option. He had also wished Pym copious amounts of luck.

For the first day and night there had been no change in Axel’s condition. He had grown so delirious that he made no sense at all, and spent the time he wasn’t writhing around in a state of semi-consciousness, staring up at the ceiling though Pym knew he wasn’t seeing it. Pym ran back and forth to fetch water, letting it warm slightly from cold to just cool, soaking towels in it and laying them over Axel’s head and chest. When Axel slept Pym took the chance to run out and clean the used towels, hang them up to dry and run back with fresh ones. He caught maybe two hours’ sleep on the first night, but worry kept him rigidly awake. When he could, he would drip small amounts of water onto Axel’s cracked lips, hoping that he would be getting some of it. Sometimes Axel would seem to look at him, but Pym knew it was an illusion. Axel’s eyes were seeing something, but whatever it was, it wasn’t in the room with them. Pym saw him sometimes, when he was staring at the ceiling; he would move his eyes back and forth, dart them around like he was watching something. Every so often his lips would move, but his voice was never audible. Pym would be at his most frightened then, imagining that Axel was so close to death that he might be seeing things. If Axel fell asleep after such an incident, Pym would sit up next to him until he woke again, watching to make sure Axel’s chest continued to rise and fall.

On the afternoon of the second day there seemed to be some change for the better. The fever seemed to be breaking, and Axel reacted with disgruntled discomfort despite being barely conscious. He squirmed around and tried to push the towels away, then seemed to realise how hot he was and grabbed for them back, then pushed them away again. The battle continued until the evening, when Axel fell asleep long enough that Pym was able to doze, too. When Axel awoke he had a terrible headache, apparently incredibly severe, because Pym spent the next forty minutes cleaning vomit off everything. For somebody who hadn’t eaten in several days, Pym had to admit it was impressive. 

Axel slept frequently and fitfully after that. He woke up almost every time with a start, words in a language Pym didn’t recognise dying on his tongue as consciousness returned to him. Sometimes Axel would appear to remember them too, because he would look around himself wildly and sometimes shy away from Pym when he approached; it would take all of Pym’s German and sometimes even some of his English to comfort him from a fear he did not understand at all. Gradually Axel’s words became more coherent, and finally to a language that Pym understood, and Pym then had a new thing to worry about.

He never knew how to react when Axel would tell him things. They were only snippets of things, really, but Pym was armed with enough snippets by now that he could put the information together to paint an increasingly horrific picture of Axel’s life wandering through war-torn Europe. He knew for a fact that Axel would never have told him outside of these instances, because Axel had plenty of time to tell him whatever he wanted and he never mentioned it. Their conversations ranged all over the place and Axel had brought up the war in different contexts many times before; he also wasn’t the kind of person to tiptoe around what he wanted to say. The Slavic part of him had combined with the exposure to German culture and had left Axel with a very forward way of doing things. Wasting time was not something he appreciated. If he wanted to say something, he would say it.

So it felt like treachery, to be sitting beside Axel while he hugged the blanket around himself, shivering so violently that Pym worried he would get injured. His dark eyes were always wider than any eyes Pym had ever seen, and they would dart around the room in that unnerving yet familiar way. Pym was always sure that he could see whatever it was that he was so scared of. He had no idea how somebody could be so scared, otherwise. Even if it was just a nightmare – which Axel was prone to having – he would usually gather himself within thirty seconds of waking. These times were different. Axel would sit stock-still for sometimes minutes at a time, the silence only broken by his occasional muttering. Pym got the impression that Axel didn’t even realise he was sitting there; he would murmur to himself in a cadence that sounded like pleading, other time he would speak out loud to somebody only he could see. Growing increasingly more common now that the fever was breaking, however, were Axel’s impassioned rants, at first directed at nobody and then at Pym, once Axel’s awareness came back enough to register that he was in the room.

“You wait on me like you expect me to die at any moment,” he said one night, clearly addressing Pym yet with his eyes fixed on something over by the door.

“Well, you were quite sick,” Pym said pleasantly, as though he didn’t mind a bit, which he didn’t. “You have to admit that in your state, dying was a very real possibility. I wouldn’t want that to happen, obviously.”

“Nonsense,” Axel said dismissively. He shifted in the blankets, groaned in pain, and beat a fist briefly at his hip. “Stop that, will you? When will you ever stop?”

“Don’t hit it, Axel,” Pym warned. “You’ll only make it ache worse.”

“It couldn’t ache any fucking worse,” Axel snapped. It was always unusual to hear him swear; Pym knew he must be in extreme pain. “There’s half a British shell in there, Sir Magnus, and some shrapnel to boot. On top of that the shell decided to bring its good friend building down with it, and that landed on the whole thing for good measure.”

“I’m sorry,” Pym said, as sincerely as though he were the one that had dropped the shell on him in the first place.

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Axel continued. He was massaging at the hip now, roughly, Pym thought. His fingers dug into his skin like claws and he squeezed the skin trapped here, his face shiny with sweat. Pym wanted to tell him to stop, but he knew it would be useless. He wondered if it helped, like lancing a stubborn boil – if Axel could somehow twist all the pain out in one go if he squeezed and hit and rubbed enough. Other times he wondered if Axel might be trying to ground himself. It seemed that way sometimes, when he was slipping on the fine line between lucidity and delirium, like Pym knew he was doing now. He wanted to warn Axel to stop, remind him that his tongue got loose during times like this because it was the most dangerous time for conversation – his tongue was unrestrained by his brain being elsewhere, but enough of him was present that whatever came out of his mouth would be coherent, it would be lucid, it would be horrific. 

“Do you know how much use you are with a crushed hip, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked. “Not at all. I thought for sure they were going to shoot me on the spot. But they didn’t. Christ, I sometimes wish they had.”

“Do you still wish that?” Pym asked. Sometimes the only thing to do was to amiably keep the conversation going and wait for the inevitable moment in ten or fifteen minutes when Axel would tire himself out and simply lapse into silence again. He tried to work out what was worse – Axel when he was speaking so candidly like this, or Axel when he was barely a person, staring at nothing and starting at something all at once. 

“On nights like these, I do,” Axel said, frowning as he rubbed the heel of his hand into his hip. Pym saw his foot twitch with pain under the blankets. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Axel,” Pym said. “I am, honestly. It would be a shame if you had died.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Axel said. Everything was nonsense to him tonight, apparently, including why he had lived and why so many others had died. “What I don’t understand is why I’m still here when there were countless others like me who perished. Where is the fairness in that? Where is the logic? I’m certain you like me very much but what about all the other Sir Manguses out there who haven’t got the person they were supposed to meet because some god forsaken shell exploded on their leg? Perhaps they survived that and died on the way to the hospital instead. I wouldn’t blame them. It was so cold the blood would freeze in the wounds, and the hospitals wouldn’t fare any better. They put me on the floor when I first got there because they didn’t want to waste a bed on somebody who was going to die. I heard them say it. They didn’t realise I was still conscious, I was in such a state. And then I had had to get to the hospital through that weather. No wonder they thought I was dead. If I had been them I would have probably thrown me out back to save the floor space.”

“How didn’t you die?” Pym asked. He was gently rubbing at Axel’s hip now; the man, incensed by his memories, had allowed him to do it without realising. He didn’t seem to protest to the lighter pressure, and his foot had stopped twitched. He sat with his back against the headboard, his eyes half closed, and for a moment Pym wondered if he had fallen asleep. When he spoke again he sounded confused, as though for the entire time he had been silent he had been pondering Pym’s question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Luck. I suppose. If that’s what you want to call it. I am apparently very difficult to kill. Many people have tried to do it, but here I am.”

“I’m glad for it, “Pym said again. “I know you say lots of people are deserving but I really do think you’re on to something, Axel. You’re the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

Axel snorted. “And you are a child. You have not met many. But I appreciate it. You always have kind words. I don’t know what I did to make you think that I deserve them.”

“By your earlier logic, nobody does anything to deserve anything,” Pym said simply, and he felt Axel’s eyes on him. Whether they were endeared or annoyed he would never know, because by the time he looked Axel had cleared the expression from his face. 

“Do you feel how the bone is?” he asked, as Pym continued to massage. “Feel how it is. Isn’t it vile? They had to shorten my leg. It was the only way they could save it. For a long while they thought they were going to have to cut it off but they didn’t. I was unconscious at the time, too. Injured, with a fever from all the walking. I was very sick. If they’d chopped it off I suppose I would have the small mercy that I likely would not have survived the surgery. Even so, I would have rather liked the opportunity to defend my leg.”

“You would have woken up and fought them, Axel,” Pym said, with such sincerity that Axel actually laughed.

“I would have liked to see me try! If you thought I was skinny now you should have seen me then. A strong wind could have done me in. In fact, if you count how sick I was, I suppose you could say that it already nearly did. It killed many of us, in the hospital. When they staff there thought it was likely I would survive they put me in a bed. We had one pillow and one blanket to share between two of us. On some nights, if there was an attack nearby, we would have to share the bed with two others. Do you know how many times I woke up to corpses, Sir Magnus? Do you know what it’s like to wake up to find an ice cold body stuck to you in rigor mortis, sucking what little warmth you have left out of you? It is a hell I would not wish on anyone.”

Pym felt a shiver travel up his spine. He could almost feel it as Axel described it, the vivid imagery conjured up in his mind from some of Axel’s earlier, less lucid rants on the subject. When he was especially delirious Axel tended to go for a more poetic route, and Pym found it much scarier to listen to. Axel would home in on certain aspects, describing them in a way that had Pym, despite his disgust, fall in love with the German language all over again. He described glassy eyes with a film of milk over them, he described clawed hands as pale as ivory, he described the cold has it had gnawed its way through his bones and settled into him so deeply that one night, he confessed to Pym, he didn’t think he would ever be warm again. He had said that he still felt them when he woke up, no matter how many blankets he had slept with, no matter if one of his Marthas was curled up next to him, fast asleep and warm. It was like something out of a ghost story, Pym thought. If it hadn’t been so inappropriate he would have suggested Axel think about writing some horror stories when he was up late at night, tapping away on his typewriter. He wondered if Axel would ever show him anything that he had written, and then supposed that he probably wouldn’t. Perhaps this was the kind of thing that he wrote about? The things that Axel would never mention again until the next time this happened, and while Pym knew it was inevitable he still hoped that Axel would never go through this again. 

“Is that why you don’t sleep often?” he asked. If Axel was going to continue to ramble, Pym thought it would be kinder to guide him with questions he could choose or refuse to answer. Axel pondered on the question for a while, and again Pym thought he had fallen asleep. When he spoke again his voice was certainly tired, and Pym kept an eye on what he was doing with his hands, now massaging circles into Axel’s leg. He hoped that the action was comforting to Axel, and that perhaps that was why Axel was beginning to doze off. It was getting towards the end of Axel’s allotted time awake, Pym knew, but he liked to hope.

“There are a lot of reasons why I don’t like to sleep, Sir Magnus. Believe it or not the biggest reason is that I don’t like to waste time. But I suppose you would be right in assuming that this also has something to do with it. And then there is the fact that bad things always happen in the night, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so,” Pym said, remembering he was supposed to be a war hero, remembering he should share Axel’s fear of shells and bombs and night time ambushes. He thought that Axel probably wasn’t buying it by this point, and he also wondered if there was anything he could do to persuade him. Would he have to fake the kind of nightmares that he heard Axel having, with his gaps and his cries that cut short, with his ragged breaths heard through the walls? Would he have to gaze off into the distance like Axel so often did, seeing things that weren’t there? For all the deceit that Pym had pulled off in his time, nothing seemed quite as disgusting to him as that. He vowed to himself to never bother. Whatever had happened, whatever had caused this – it was Axel’s and Axel’s alone. Pym knew all too well what it felt like to have something that should only be yours taken and used. He would not do it to his friend.

“I like to be awake during the night,” Axel said. “I think that if anything bad is going to happen it should have to look me in the eye before it does so, don’t you think?”

“I think that’s a fine idea. Very brave.”

“And so far nothing bad has happened, though sometimes I think it almost did.”

Axel’s speech was beginning to slur again; Pym knew he must be close to falling asleep.

“What do you think almost happened, Axel?”

“Do you not hear them sometimes, Sir Magnus?” Axel asked, sounding genuinely surprised even through his tiredness. “The voices in the hall, the footsteps on the stairs? Do you not hear them crawling on the rooftop?”

“I can’t say I do. I must be a very deep sleeper.”

“They go away once morning comes,” Axel said. “I think they see that I am awake, and they try and wait for me to go to bed. But I won’t do it, not until the light comes.” He sat up a little straighter, and Pym saw the effort it took Axel to keep his eyes open. “I should stay awake.”

“You should rest,” Pym warned him. “Nothing will happen. I’m here, remember? I’ll be awake. Will they still come if I’m awake, or does it have to be you?”

“I don’t know,” Axel said, his eyelids drooping again.

“I think it will be fine if I’m awake,” Pym assured him. “I will keep a close eye on you, Axel. Remember, you have been sleeping a lot lately, and they haven’t come. Nothing has happened.”

“And you weren’t sleeping?” Axel asked. Pym decided not to tell him about the dozing, feeling as though it would stress him. He needed Axel to get some sleep, while he was still delirious enough to be persuaded. No amount of logic would be worth the risk, anyway: Pym could tell Axel time and time again that he had dozed plenty of times and nobody have come, but Axel would be hearing voices outside the attic window before he had finished.

“I wasn’t sleeping. How could I sleep when you were so sick? I had to keep cooling you down. Your temperature was so high. Do you think that’s what you heard, Axel? You had a bad fever, maybe you didn’t recognise the voices.”

“Do not try to deceive me,” Axel said firmly, though some of the effect was lost by the way that his words were now slurring together. Pym stood up and gently manoeuvred Axel back into bed, laying him down and tucking the blankets around him. He had to marvel at the sight, knowing that there was no way in hell that Axel would let him do it at any other time. Axel hated to be in bed, which was unfortunate, because he got sick often now the weather was getting colder and bed was a place he found himself in for the entirety of that time.

“Get some sleep,” Pym told him. “I’m sorry. I believe you. I’ll keep my ears out, OK? And if I hear them I’ll wake you up. We can keep watch together.”

“You had better. I don’t want you taking any chances.”

“If it’s too dangerous we can always run,” Pym said, teasingly, and miraculously there was a flicker of a smile on Axel’s face.

“Can you imagine me running in this state? Don’t be a fool.”

“I bet you could outrun me if somebody bad enough was chasing you.”

“So I outrun you. Where do I go then? I can hardly hide out in another barn. I have hidden in barns all across Europe. They are cold and awful.”

“But you’re not in one now, so make the most of it while you still can. Get some sleep. Please, Axel. It’ll do you good.”

Thankfully Axel seemed to have fallen asleep somewhere in the middle of Pym’s sentence. Pym hovered by his bed for a long moment, watching him, and then softly moved back to his chair to continue his vigil.


End file.
